I'm checking out the websites of the authors attending COSine this weekend, so I have some idea of who they are, what they write, and how much they need my help, and wow, seriously. 1995-era GeoCities just called and wants its websites back. Yikes!

I mock because I love, but seriously, folks: the whole point of an author's site is to get readers to read what you've written, so give them that information. Most readers don't care about your cat, your past lives, or your obsession with Cheez-Its; we're visiting your site because we read something by you that we enjoyed and now we just want to read more of your stories.

More on this topic later. (I'm working on a presentation about it right now, as a matter of fact.)

 I'm not just saying that: I really do love helping authors reach out to readers, and I hate seeing it done badly. It causes me physical pain every time I visit an author's site that looks like it was thrown together by the neighbor's kid or That Guy you know from work who knows web design. *rolls eyes* You get what you pay for, folks!

What I found really interesting is that the author didn't choose the visual "effect" to build the attraction between Evan and Roman, he/she chose to build an attraction based on little things, like the timber of voices, common interests… chemistry.

I've been setting up nginx, qmail, vpopmail, ezmlm-idx, etc., on my new VPS on slicehost (yay, slicehost!), and figured I'd post my notes in case they're useful to anyone else, since finding even tiny bits and pieces helped along the way and kept me from tearing my hair out while trying to work out how everything fits together. *vbg*

These are my (very brief) notes about how to set up a new mailing list in ezmlm, when using vpopmail's virtual domains with a mysql backend. (Yes, I realize I haven't posted about the parts of the server set up that came first, but these are the most complete notes I have at the moment. *g*)

Online school directory for El Paso and Teller counties, Colorado, USA (broken now). (The much better, non-corporate mush version is here on my site. [Also dead now, as I don't want to update the code for newer versions of php and mysql.]) I have a ton of additions and improvements that I want to add as I have time, not the least of which is point clustering and geocoding/adding an address marker and displaying schools within a certain radius.

To be added at a later date:

point clustering

figure out how to scan a JSON file to pull out just certain records from the array (all records in category c) so I can load everything once, rather than having to make a php/mysql call for each option; otherwise I need to figure out how to get an animated "I'm loading, dammit!" graphic to work with the asynchronous data call

zoom to district boundaries when displaying that district's schools

link to district info/schools from legend

label district polygons

display schools within x radius of a user input address (temp fix in the meantime: directions to and from links)